Front matter (continued 2)

"It's rotten luck," said Leighton, "but I believe they've got us scotched. We've tried seven cases, four of them twice and two three times; we've had our hands full with appeals, and the only one of the lot that we've sent to jail is a peanut politician from Second Avenue who doesn't control ten votes."

"Yes," said O'Mara, "and they let him go because they believed he was getting ready to go back on them next election."

"We've got to begin lower down," concluded Leighton, "and work up."

He began immediately. He found that, in violation of the law, cocaine was sold at scores of places on the East Side, and that the use of the drug was spreading alarmingly. Against these retailers he proceeded with all the vigor he had shown in his larger and less productive efforts. Evidence to convict the sources of supply was hard to get, since those sources were high in Tammany politics, but small sellers and street peddlers were rushed to jail with such commendable speed that the trade soon seemed abolished.

Luke appeared in some of these cases, and won most that he appeared in. He had been feeling the chill of disappointment, but this gave him fresh courage. One day, when Uhler was on vacation and Luke was taking the work of the absent man, he thought he saw the chance to approach "the people higher up," which they had all been waiting for.

A gang-leader named Zantzinger had been dancing with his wife at a ball on the second floor of a house in Avenue A. As he waltzed past the door leading to the back stairs, a friend looked in and called Zantzinger aside.

"Excuse me a minute," said the gangster to his wife.

He left her and went to his friend.

"Well?" he demanded.

"Butch Dellitt's down there," warned his friend, nodding toward the door. "His crowd's after you 'cause they say you piped off Dutch's brother-in-law's poolroom to the fly cops. He says he's goin' to croak you."

"Where is he?"

"He'll be 'round front when you come out."

"Where is he now?"

"Down back."

"Down these stairs?"

The friend nodded.

Zantzinger walked to his wife.

"I've got a little business below," he explained. "Wait here: I'll be right back."

He opened the door and descended the stairs. As he went, he drew his revolver. Dellitt was standing in the doorway, with his back to the stairs, smoking a cigarette. Without warning, Zantzinger shot him through the head. Then he returned to the ballroom, apologized to his wife for leaving her so hurriedly, and resumed his interrupted dance.

This was the story that came to the homicide bureau. Luke took it at once to Leighton.

"And this man Zantzinger," he reminded the District-Attorney, "is the right-hand man of the Tammany leader in that ward."

"Who saw him?" asked Leighton.

"Three men on the street."

"Got their names?"

"We can get them."

"Is the coroner on the case?"

Luke thought he was.

Leighton shrugged.

"Then that'll be the end of it," he said.

Luke could not credit this.

"Oh, yes," said Leighton wearily, "I mean it. By the time he's done with the case, he'll see to it nobody knows anything. Why, man alive, that coroner's the cousin of the ward leader."

"But you'll try?" urged Luke. "You'll fight?"

Leighton swung back in his swivel-chair. He put his feet on his desk and clasped his hands behind his head.

"No," he said, "I won't. What's the use? I'm getting tired of trying to do things with all the people taking no interest and a Democratic Mayor and Police Commissioner fighting against me." He spoke like a man at last driven to declare something he has long striven to conceal. "If ever I want to be re-elected," he continued, "this office has got to be more careful about taking up cases that are lost to begin with."

§4. Luke fought hard with the ugly doubt this incident raised. He tried to convince himself that Leighton had spoken only in a moment of passing weariness and discouragement; but he daily found this endeavor more difficult. What suddenly turned his mind to other things was the news that an aunt, his father's widowed sister who lived in Philadelphia, had died, leaving him a hundred thousand dollars.

CHAPTER IV

§1. Luke had never expected to be possessed of so much money. His father's income was comfortable, but it was well understood that the family lived somewhat beyond it, and that what might be left at the Congressman's death would go to his widow for life and, after that, to Luke's sister Jane. The Philadelphia aunt had inherited her fortune from her husband, and her affection for her relatives was generally supposed to be slight. Luke, consequently, found himself in a position for which he was totally unprepared.

"I suppose," he said to Ruysdael, to whom he went for advice, "that I ought to invest it."

"You ought to lose no time," counseled Ruysdael. "A hundred thousand dollars is too much for a young man to have at his call in New York. It's not enough to spend, and it's too much to gamble with in the bucket-shops."

Ruysdael thought he knew a safe investment.

"There's a man named Forbes," he said—"Wallace K. Forbes, who came to the offices of our estate the other day when I happened to be there. He wanted to borrow just the amount you name, and my agent says it's a good thing; but we happened to have a bigger one on hand. His concern's an old one, one of the oldest American firms in its line; this man's the third generation of his family to be in it, so it's well-established and has the good old-fashioned element of family pride behind it. Nowadays, you don't find many men regard their businesses the way an English landed gentleman used to regard his estates and his family honor; but Forbes seems to be an exception."

"What is the business?" asked Luke.

"Ready-made clothing, and well made, too, I'm told."

"Still, he does need money."

"Yes, but you couldn't get in if he didn't need it. He only wants it to complete some improvements he's begun. He's perfectly well-grounded, but I suppose he has to keep up with the progress of the trade. Of course, that very element of family pride might disincline him to give an outsider any hold on the business, but if you want me to, I'll have Croy—that's the man that runs our estate for us—look into the situation and sound Forbes."

Luke, after some satisfactory inquiries in other quarters, acquiesced in this proposal. All the reports were good, and that of Herbert Croy, the shriveled Ruysdael lawyer, was especially rosy. Forbes expressed his willingness to meet Luke, and Luke called at the offices of the R. H. Forbes & Son's factory in Brooklyn.

The present head of the firm was a grave man with a direct and unassuming manner. His aquiline nose gave his face the air of strength, and his mustache and the hair about his temples being slightly touched with gray, he seemed sober and conservative. He sat at a plain roll-top desk, in a room simply furnished, and he lost no time in coming at once to business.

"Would you like to walk through the place?" he inquired, when he had told Luke much of what Ruysdael had already said.

"I suppose I ought to," smiled Luke; "though of course I don't know enough about the business to appreciate what you show me."

Forbes smiled sadly.

"You are no different, then," he said, "from most modern investors, or, for the matter of that, most owners of businesses either. In these times the average president of a company thinks he earns his salary by manipulating its stock; he seldom knows anything about the work that makes the stock marketable. Our firm isn't like that."

Under Forbes's care, Luke was accordingly taken through the factory, with which, he noted, the office of the chief administrative was in close touch. He was shown the room where the cloth manufacturers brought their products; the scales to weigh the material; the windmill-like machine that spread the offered fabric on its wide arms and, turning at the will of the expert buyers, displayed its burden before the examiners in a strong north light; the long boards on which, having been re-rolled, the cloth, once its quality had been thus determined, was again uncoiled, an ingenious contrivance attached to the uncoiling-wheel stamping its measurements at every fifth revolution.

"We have to be careful," Forbes explained. "Business isn't so honest as it once was, and if the cloth-makers could gain an inch in ten yards, they'd do it."

The factory, which closed the end of a street, was built about four sides of a small square, and the center of this square was occupied by a large room with overhead ventilation and lighting, the glass fluted and sloping as the ribs of a Venetian blind may be made to slope, so that, in summer, the sun's rays would be tempered to the workers under it. Here, at the tables nearest the entrance, men were employed at designing patterns of cardboard and working, amid busy calculations, with rulers and T-squares, like so many architects' draughtsmen. From them the completed patterns were taken to other tables at which they met the cloth accepted in the first room, other workmen tracing the designs in chalk upon pieces of the cloth. The problem of these second workers, Forbes explained, was to arrange the designs in such a way that almost no shred of cloth was wasted. Luke observed that they solved it with astonishing skill; and, as each piece was completed, a ticket was roughly sewn on it with written directions for its further progress and blanks to be filled in by the signature of each worker responsible for its future steps.

Then came what to Luke was the most wonderful part of the work. Nineteen pieces of unmarked cloth to be made into suits of the same style as that on which the chalk pattern had been outlined, were laid under that piece and the whole bundle given to a man at a large table. Through a slit in the center of this table, a knife of incredible strength and keenness plunged rapidly up and down. The man in charge forced the bundle against the knife, deftly pushing it forward, so that the blade followed the lines drawn upon the top piece, and in three minutes a score of suits of clothes were cut into their various parts and were being sorted and ticketed and signed for waiting boys to carry them to the sewing-machines.

"Those patterns look like the parts of a jig-saw puzzle," said Luke, "and that knife looks like a cross between a jig-saw and the guillotine."

"It cuts twenty suits at a time," said Forbes gravely, "and the bottom one doesn't vary the thirtieth of an inch from the one on top."

"Twenty suits!" Luke wanted to rub his eyes.

"Yes; but the inventor is still at work on the knife. We hope soon to get one that will do three dozen."

At each corner of the building was an elevator and a stairway, the latter walled in so to serve as a fire-escape. Forbes took Luke up one of these stairways, a broad and easy flight of which the corners at each landing were protected by curved wainscoting to prevent jamming in case of panic.

The three floors above ground contained the rooms in which the sewing was done and one room known as the matching-room. All seemed well lighted and well aired and well protected by the overhead pipes of an automatic sprinkling-plant.

In the matching-room girls especially trained to the task selected, from vast quantities of samples, the fitting shades of thread and buttons best adapted to the different bundles of cut fabric brought by elevators from the cutting department below. Beside them were four other girls, who worked at a contrivance in which, when covered buttons were required, an uncovered button, a piece of tin and a bit of cloth were inserted, a lever pulled and the three factors withdrawn ready clamped together and complete for use. From here, after the tickets had been signed, and the necessary further directions added to them, the cloth was sent on to the sewing-rooms.

Luke found those sewing-rooms crowded with machines of possibilities that he had heretofore never dreamed machines could realize; machines horrible because they seemed half-human, and diabolically intelligent; machines that not only moved up and down in the manner of the old foot-pumped sewing-machine in the second floor back of his home in Americus, but twirled and danced over the cloth pressed under them by women feeding them as a frightened keeper in a menagerie might feed an angry beast. They were all of them run by steam or gasoline, and Forbes told Luke that they were all made by one trust, which owned all the patents. There were different machines for every kind of sewing, for every loop that could be required of the thread: machines for hemming; machines for the cord-stitch, the lock-stitch, the chain-stitch, and the damask-stitch; machines for sewing the cloth together, for sewing the lining, for sewing the trouser-seams; and there was one machine, the needle of which moved in dizzy zigzag, for sewing, on a sort of herring-bone design, the stiffening material into coats.

Next Luke was shown a room in which, on benches a foot from the floor, beside tables six inches high, sat rows of intent little girls, their arms flying like flails as they stitched the shoulders into the coats, and still another row in which still other girls, their arms flying in a similar manner, sewed buttons on coats, waistcoats, and trousers—the only two processes that invention was as yet unable wholly to deliver over to machinery. Lastly, there was a half-floor given to what at first looked like linotype machines, and at these sat brawny women who passed over the coat-shoulders long flat-irons, each heated by flexible tubes attached to it and reminiscent, for Luke, of those terrible instruments that, immediately revolving, grind the heart and lungs out of a patient's teeth.

Forbes exhibited it all with a quiet pride. He said there was no work sent out of the factory, and so no "sweating"; the factory was a union shop; there had never been but one strike, and that one was speedily adjusted by arbitration.

Luke was impressed. He secured favorable reports from a financial agency and from a firm of expert accountants. Then he invested his fortune in R. H. Forbes & Son.

§2. About this time, the United States Senate happened to be investigating itself and unavoidably stumbled upon a witness whose testimony filled all the newspapers for several weeks and remained a matter of public comment for quite two months. Perhaps because he had fallen out with his employers, this witness insisted upon telling how he had for ten years been hired by a combination of the ruling corporations to influence national legislation. Five hundred letters and telegrams substantiated his assertions; he gave dates and mentioned places; the names of popular idols fell from his lips with infinite carelessness, and the idols broke as their names fell.

Speaking in unimpassioned detail, the informer showed how his activities had covered the entire country and included the chiefs of both the large parties with a splendid catholicity. He had bought the services of labor leaders to end strikes, had broken up unions by purchasing information from their members, and had ended one dispute by having himself appointed a member of its arbitration board. He had operated in congressional campaigns throughout the Union, and he told how he had bought the defeat at the polls of members of Congress that sought re-election after having opposed the corporate interests at Washington, and how he had spent thousands of the trusts' dollars in electing candidates who, personally or through their bosses, promised that they would support a high tariff and prevent the passage of laws too kindly to the working class. He had hired congressional clerks and pages, the former to betray what advance information came to them, the latter to pick up valuable gossip. He had the secretaries of Congressmen on his salary-roll when he could not buy or defeat their masters or when, having bought those masters, he feared treachery. He had secured the appointment of those legislators in his pay to important committees, and he had, he said, planned and secured the establishment of a national tariff commission for the benefit of the powers he served. Those powers were headed by the man that Jack Porcellis likened to Shakespeare and that the derelict in the Essex Street saloon called the King.

Luke, who of course had nothing to do with the management of the Forbes company, nevertheless occasionally passed an evening at the quiet Brooklyn home of its president, who was a widower living alone with his only child, Betty, a pretty, high-colored, brown-eyed girl, as yet unformed and only twenty-two years old. As a rule, these two men sat in the parlor, a room that retained the character of Forbes's grandfather, and talked of everything and nothing, the girl rarely intruding upon them. It was inevitable that they should, during the floodtide of the Washington scandal, speak of its revelations.

"I don't know what to make of them," sighed Luke. "It seems as if the fellows at the head of our party were no better than the fellows at the head of the other."

"They are not," said Forbes with conviction. "Here they all are blackmailing the tariff, a system the country owes all its prosperity to."

"We shall have to pick honest leaders in the future," Luke reflected. He still believed in the power of a party's individual members. "We've simply been too easy-going in the past."

Forbes thought this would avail nothing.

"The parties themselves are rotten," he declared, "and the deeper a man gets into them, no matter how well he starts out, the more certain he is to be infected. You see how even the good measures are fraudulently put through. Then here's our own state with a Governor we all believed in—a Democrat, to be sure, but an anti-Tammany man. He comes out for a fine thing like direct primaries. Well, the other day an Assemblyman I know went to him and asked him to sign a bill this Assemblyman wanted passed. What happened? The Governor said: 'Will you vote for the direct primary law?' The Assemblyman happens to be a fool and against that law. He said he'd vote against it, and he tells me the Governor told him in that case the other bill wouldn't be signed. No, the thing we need in this country is a brand-new party run by honest business men on sound business principles."

Luke could not yet consider such a revolution; but the next day the papers contained further news of the senatorial investigation, which lent weight to Forbes's opinion. A witness, after testimony further entangling that great financier whose power seemed to pervade the country's entire industrial system, described an alleged forgery in the books of a railway known to be controlled by Porcellis's hero and eager to evade the anti-trust laws. According to this witness, a "double entry" of $2,000,000, representing securities that the road assumed in taking over two other roads, was carried in the "Consolidated balance sheet" for some time, then erased from one side of the ledger, and left as a credit balance on the other side.

"They took all the securities of the acquired roads," he swore, "and used them as securities for a bond-issue. They got that money and used it to finance two other outside transactions that they sold out at a tremendous profit."

He named as participants in this three Senators high in the councils of Luke's party.

"Of course they're a bad lot," Leighton cheerfully admitted when the District-Attorney's staff gossiped about the latest revelation, "and the party is no better right here in New York than it is in any other state. But you can't repair an organization by smashing it. What we need is reform within the party. The party must reform itself. And that's what I'm trying to bring about."

He did, indeed, give out interviews to this effect, and gathered a considerable following. A little convention was called at Saratoga where, fired by fresh faith, Luke made his first political speech, holding up Leighton as the Erasmus of Republicanism. It was an unfortunate simile, for the opposition press lost no time in lampooning the District-Attorney as Erasmus at his weakest; but the movement grew, and Luke, in common with his fellow-believers, began to see light in the political darkness.

He still possessed the beautiful power of dreaming, and when, by night, coming from a theater or leaving the house of Mrs. Ruysdael or one of her friends, he turned into Broadway and saw the myriad lights of its cafés mount heavenward and mix with and illuminate the pillars of smoke and steam rising from its chimneys, he could detect in their wreaths the faces of grinning devils raised by the pestilential life below, laughing at it, dipping enormous white claws to stir it, and then hissing skyward as if to proclaim, because of what New York was, their defiance of God. Once or twice, to escape from them, he walked as far downtown as Wall Street and loitered through the silent night, where the three churches stood on the modern battleground of mad finance to remind of its history the city with the shortest memory in Christendom. Mentally, he converted that portion of the town to what it once had been. He saw it the home of a modest aristocracy in simple houses along shaded streets, a center of good taste, of culture, of social well-being.

The old Astor House, now fallen into shabby desuetude, he pictured as it was when state banquets were given there, and when it was the one place in which the distinguished visitor would stop. Close by the spot where the Woolworth Building to-day houses eighteen thousand persons, the Astor House had moved Horace Greeley to admiration because six hundred and forty-seven persons slept under its roof. There Clay had received the news of his nomination in 1844, and Webster the word of his defeat at the hands of the Whig convention in 1852. That hotel had been familiar to Pierce, Van Buren, Buchanan, and Taylor, to Seward, Choate, and Douglas. Edward, Prince of Wales, had given it an almost royal atmosphere, and recollections of Lincoln still hung about its tarnished walls.

Would the old spirit come back again? Could it return? Luke was sure that it could and would. He was sure that Leighton, and the honest men associated with him, had begun a movement that must end by restoring the nation's lost ideals. Government would govern, honest property would be protected, religion would again open man's eyes to his own littleness and the omnipotence of the Deity. There would be legislation that would be the end of industrial combinations, of the crushing of the small manufacturer and the grinding of the faces of the poor. No more national banks would be merged, none would engage in promoting or underwriting; interlocking directorates would cease, and the concentration of credit, the Money Trust, would forever after be an impossibility. It was so easy. It needed but an awakened conscience in the majority of the voters and a few conscientious men to lead.

§3. Luke's father died within three years after the young man entered upon his duties under Brouwer Leighton. The elder Huber had embarked his small fortune in an adventure that, as events soon proved, was opposed to one of the interests of the great financier whom he had once so much admired: those interests ruined the adventure and, more from grief because of this than from any specific malady, the Congressman fell in the fight. He died proud of his son—a pride that Mrs. Huber and Jane zealously shared—and he left the family in Luke's care.

The young man, who had loved his father in spite of all the differences between them, and long felt the loss, met this situation without complaint. Neither the mother nor the sister wanted to go to New York, and, as Luke managed to live within his meager salary, he was able to continue for them the home in Americus upon the income from his now well-paying investment in R. H. Forbes & Son. Jane, indeed, soon engaged herself and was married to a Doncaster lawyer who secured an election to the late Mr. Huber's seat in Congress, so that Luke's expenses in Americus were light.

He began to fall in love with Betty Forbes. The women of the Ruysdael set did not fail to attract him, but he never considered them as within his means, and so speedily placed them outside of his desires. Forbes's daughter, on the other hand, was the feminine counterpart of her father, and, as she grew, she developed many of his qualities, being quiet, determined, unobtrusive, and womanly in the sense in which men like Forbes used that word before Woman began to give it a new significance. Accepting the world in the garb in which Forbes thought it well to present it to her, she owned only the finest standards of her type, and there was no meanness in her. Physically, she had that rarity in young women: height combined with grace. Her hair, as Luke saw it, was like so much sunshine, her eyes were clear and brown, and the radiance of her coloring not even a man that was not her lover could deny. Luke, for his part, thought her far too good for him. He told himself she was all that the people of the Ruysdael set should be and were not: she made important and shameful the casual relations he had had with women of the half-world and that in their occurrence—less frequent than is usual in the lives of young men—had seemed trivial and matter-of-fact; and therefore he determined to win her, so soon as he could make a place for himself through the pursuit of his ideals.

§4. That pursuit grew daily more difficult. The candle of his faith in Leighton, though it continued to burn steadily, burned less fiercely than of old. The movement for reform within the party spread, but it spread almost too rapidly; it came to include certain politicians who were now for the first time in their careers evincing a desire for the organization's betterment, and that only after the organization had failed to re-elect them to office. These men, in one or two instances, came into control, and it was soon necessary to reform the reformers. Sometimes Leighton appeared disheartened, and Luke began to acquire a weary and well-nigh uninterested manner in dealing with his part of the crusade.

"Look here," he once said to his chief, "that fellow you got a pardon for last week has been in to see me."

"Yes?" said Leighton. His feet were cocked on his desk and, in his favorite attitude, he was leaning back in his chair with his fingers clasped in his crisp, black hair. His face was not the face that Luke had known when he first came to New York.

"Well," continued the assistant, "he came in just after I got back from the Ludlow Street Jail. That place is full of nobody but husbands who won't pay alimony, but the keepers act as valets and barbers and do light housekeeping for the prisoners."

"It's the civil prison. We can't help it."

"Couldn't you swing things so a Grand Jury would report on it?"

"What's the use? And what has Ludlow Street got to do with Auburn, where our pardoned friend has been?"

"Only this: the rich men in Ludlow Street are living as if they were in a hotel, but at Auburn, this fellow says, they've got a cell with pointed nails in the floor so a prisoner sent to it for bad behavior can't sit down or sleep. They've—— Oh, I can't go into it all now; but the women are treated as bad as the men; the thing must be worse than the Black Hole of Calcutta, and all the while the State's paying for the warden's horses and carriages."

Leighton showed some interest, but later, when Luke returned to the subject, he said there was nothing to be done: the political situation would not just then permit it.

Came the unmasking of one of the new partisans of reform. This man, a Simon Kaindiac, was an inspector in the New York post-office. Federal detectives arrested him and showed him to have made a fortune by extortion from swindling concerns that were using the United States mails to entrap their victims.

"I know, I know!" cried Leighton peevishly when Uhler brought him the news in Luke's presence. "But how am I to blame for that? All the papers will be at me for it. As if I were responsible for the business morals of every man that happened to think as I do about the political ethics of the party!" He turned to Luke. "What's on your mind, Huber?"

Luke said that what was on his mind was this: the office had that morning received the report of investigators who pointed out that, since the success of the cocaine raids, heroin had taken the place of the proscribed drug.

"Well," said Leighton, "I'm sorry, but the laws governing the sale of heroin aren't the same as those governing the sale of cocaine, and, until they are, you'll find you can't successfully prosecute under them."

"We might get at the thing another way," Luke protested. His growing love for Betty had given him new views on some old subjects. "They say the girls in the houses——"

Leighton swung his feet to the floor. His tired face worked irritably.

"Now, don't begin on them," he commanded. "They're the police's affair, anyhow. They've always existed and always will. They simply adapt themselves to whatever form of society happens to exist. No really effective method of regulation, let alone suppression, has ever been devised or ever will be. Gee whiz, young man, do you know what you'll get up against if you tackle this subject? For four thousand years the high-brows have been trying to make it unpopular, and they haven't succeeded yet."

It was much the same when Luke and O'Mara came across the trail of corruption among the police. They found one man who would make affidavit to the fact that patrolmen had paid him to instigate burglaries in order that the patrolmen might make arrests and win promotion. This man had friends among the keepers of illegal resorts who would swear to paying tribute to police captains. He introduced the two lawyers to a collector who said that $2,400,000 were yearly paid in this way, that he himself was the go-between for a police lieutenant, securing from fifty to five hundred dollars a month each from those who bought protection. No discretion seemed to be used, and he showed checks to corroborate his story.

"Do you think you could do anything on such evidence?" sneered Leighton. "You couldn't send a yellow dog to jail on it. This fellow confesses he's a crook himself. Start an agitation to force the Police Commissioner to resign as unfit? Not much! If he resigned, 'unfit' would mean 'guilty.' His crowd's in the saddle, and if you want to unhorse him, you've got to unhorse them."

He walked up and down the floor.

"The trouble with us is we don't fight the devil with fire," he said; "and the trouble with the whole system is too many laws. There are too many lawyers at Albany and Washington; they know all about law and nothing about Man, so when the public conscience turns over and whines in its sleep, these fellows think they can cure it of what ails it by passing a few more laws. They pass a law against dance-halls, and they breed brothels. That's the way it goes all down the line. They pass a lot of such laws and then say: 'Now, let the District-Attorney do the rest.' I wish they had my job for one day! People have got to understand that other people don't indulge their tastes out of mere love of law-breaking."

He took another turn of the room.

"And if we're going to whip political gangs," he said, "we must have a political gang of our own, and one better than the one we happen to be fighting. There's Tim Heney over on the East Side. He may be as crooked as God makes them, but when people give him votes, he gives them coal in winter and picnics in summer. He goes to their funerals and their weddings, and he knows more about what the people of this country want than Thomas Jefferson would have known if he'd lived to be a hundred. And what's more, he can do what none of your statesmen ever can do: he can keep them quiet. Do you wonder? Think what he does for them. Do you wonder they stick to him?"

§5. Luke began to believe that Forbes was right: There was need of a new party. Daily his lethargy increased; daily he lived more in his love for Betty and in the dreams that emerged less and less upon the plane of his actual life.

His contact with the bar did not raise either it or the bench in his estimation. In a file of documents at his office, the legacy of a former administration, he came across vouchers for sums aggregating $3,000 paid by a local railway to witnesses who had sworn against a lawyer indicted for subornation of perjury in pressing a damage-case against the company, and among these was one for $500 paid to the referee that signed the report. He heard of a rural courthouse that by night became a gambling-house conducted by court officers; there was a judge on the Pacific Slope who sold a patent, the idea for which he stole from the plaintiff in a patent case in his own court; the District-Attorney of Doncaster County, in Pennsylvania, told Luke that only the statute of limitations saved from jail three associate judges of that county who had accepted bribes in the granting of liquor licenses, and that a judge in a nearby county had accepted $3,500 toward his campaign fund from brewing companies whose retailers must apply to him for licenses. It seemed that of two of the most prominent judges of the higher court in New York, one was chosen directly through the efforts of Tim Heney, and the other was the brother of the principal member of a trust which had cases in his court. A judge of a Federal Court was forced from the bench because of his financial interests in a company with which he had to deal in his judicial capacity, and a New Jersey judge, a friend of Leighton, was said to be hearing suits to which a certain railway was a party and then, during vacations, appearing in a neighboring county court as a lawyer retained by the same company.

The follies of the law appeared to be more numerous than its faults. One judicial decision enjoined members of a labor union from the peaceable persuasion from work of individuals not under agreement to work for the corporation in the mills of which a strike was in progress. A Philadelphia jurist denied the right of free speech to aliens. In Illinois, Smith appealed from a conviction for swindling Brown, and the Supreme Court upheld him because the indictment, which read that Smith "did unlawfully and feloniously obtain from Brown his money," was indefinite and misleading: the learned court held that the pronoun "his" might refer to either party, and that the Grand Jury might simply have been indicating its belief that Brown obtained his own money unlawfully.

Worse miscarriages of justice were, of course, common, even in Leighton's office, and sentences were often out of all proportion to the crimes that incurred them. The editor of a radical paper in Paterson was given an indeterminate term in prison of not less than one year and not more than fifteen years for criticising the Paterson police. The larger the scope of a swindler's transactions, the better his chances of immunity. One minor case long remained in Luke's memory. A clerk in a trust company disappeared with $25,000, and a fugitive bill of indictment was returned against him; the runaway opened negotiations with his former employers by means of advertisements in the Paris newspapers and then used his wife as an intermediary until the trust company promised to have the District-Attorney submit the indictment for a verdict of not guilty if the clerk would return with the $15,000 still in his hands; the careful fugitive hid $7,500 in Germany, and returned with the rest; he refused to tell the hiding-place until he was safe; the company found the District-Attorney willing to follow its suggestion; the verdict of Not Guilty was accordingly recorded, and the clerk, free from further harm, made over to the company the remaining $7,500 that he had left in Europe as an anchor to windward.

There was probably no more laxity among lawyers than among men of other professions, but to Luke's mind it seemed imperative that traders in justice should be especially just. He came across countless cases of pettifogging among shyster practitioners, and nearly as many suspicious actions in the ranks of their cleverer and, therefore, more successful and eminent brethren.

Ever seeking remedies, he once drew up a list of such as he found. He wanted more publicity and freedom of criticism; measures to curb the bench's power to declare laws unconstitutional, to force it to give fuller reasons in support of its decisions; he wanted devices to end "the law's delays," simplified procedure and judges who were closer to the people and farther from the corporations; he thought the courts of appeal ought to be forced to decide every question in every case appealed to them; and he advocated but one appeal in civil actions together with the right of recall both in regard to judges and to their decisions.

§6. He had come to a point where he doubted, not it is true Leighton's intentions, but his ability to achieve them. Those were the days when the Progressive Party was being formed, and Luke for some time considered it as a hopeful sign. Forbes enlisted in the ranks of the new organization and championed it wherever he went, not least among the workers in his factory. Luke had joined a club of young men who had for the most part inherited their money and were unanimous for the new movement; it was time, they said, that politics should be taken out of the hands of the muckers, and they came near to convincing Luke until, in a moment of enthusiasm, he happened upon secrets which showed him that the men in power in this party were not different from the men that had spoiled Leighton's plan for the purification of the Republican Party from within. From a source he could not doubt, he heard that even George Hallett had talked of offering his support "because these old crowds are too greedy; they're chargin' us too much; it's got to be highway robbery that big business has to submit to, and I'm tired of it."

For some time Luke lost faith in the possibility of any cure. There was talk of a movement to fuse the reform voters of all parties, but it left him cold. He had been a successful prosecutor, and his name was familiar to newspaper readers; his advocacy of Leighton had won him a prominence, even a certain following, among the public; but the irony of life was too much for him; he had, at this period, an eye too appreciative of the odds against him. He saw Betty two or three times a week, took her motoring and to the theaters, but he refrained from showing her that he loved her, because he saw no chance of offering her himself as a man worth while. The lethargy of his manner became more marked. He began to bear the outward tokens of one that does not care. To this he had come after four years in New York.

CHAPTER V

§1. The hideous North Bridge disaster occurred on a spring morning during the last year of Leighton's first term in office. The District-Attorney, whose habitual disparagement of his post did not dull his desire to retain it, was busy planning for re-election, and the work of his staff, labor how they would, was congested. The assistants were straining to make a record of convictions with which their chief might go before the electors in the autumn, and were giving to participation in political councils every half-hour that they dared spare from their legal tasks; they were hard driven and worn to the nerves; yet the news of the wreck of the Manhattan & Niagara Railway, immediately within the city's limits, burst through doors that had been opened only to men with power or appointments and swept, even from the collective mind of the corps, the bulking thought of jury lists and ballots.

The Manhattan and Niagara had entered New York only a few years before, with a line that tapped fresh territory. Along this line real-estate operators forthwith plotted ten or a dozen towns, and white-and-yellow suburbs leaped up like mushrooms. They were peopled by clerks and small businessmen that came into the city over the M. & N. every morning and returned home by the same route each evening.

From the opening of the new line, complaints had been common: it was said that the service was inadequate, that the cars and other rolling-stock were largely second-hand material purchased from the older New York & New Jersey Railroad; that the rails were the cheapest obtainable, the ties bought from an abandoned branch line near Buffalo. One serious wreck had preceded that at the North Bridge, but had not been followed by the improvements the company had promised. The patrons had protested with all the vigor Americans exhibit when they feel that a public-service corporation is cheating them, and had stopped as far on the discreet side of action as protesting Americans usually stop: the M. & N.'s parsimony became grist for the mill of the humorous weeklies and produced no further reaction. This morning, a train crowded with men going to their offices plunged through a bridge crossing an uptown street: a hundred passengers were wounded and twenty-five killed.

The earliest editions of the evening papers shrieked the news, and special editions rushed from the presses. In most of them the M. & N. had taken care to be a heavy advertiser, but here was an event so clearly due to the railway's known policy that no paper could belittle the culpability of the management: the bridge had been recently examined and pronounced safe by state inspectors, yet all reports agreed that it was constructed of the very lightest material, and the earliest evidence showed that a rail had flattened and thrown the train. To persons having a fair knowledge of current finance, it was known that the M. & N. was controlled by the group of capitalists who were actively at the management of the nominally rival N. Y. & N. J.

Luke sent his office-boy to buy him the first edition that he heard called beneath his window. It placed the dead at a hundred and the injured at thrice that figure, and when Huber's eyes caught the obscure paragraph that hinted at the real ownership of the road, his cheeks, now so generally pale, reddened, and the hand that held the paper trembled. Something of his old indignation and purpose woke in him. He ordered the boy to bring him a copy of each fresh edition as it appeared on the street, and though the lists of victims shrank to their true number, the outstanding fact of the owners' guilt remained.

Leighton passed through Luke's room on his return from luncheon. His face was drawn with the long worry of his campaign; he had been eating with two politicians and shaping plans while he bolted food.

"Begins to look as if we can get the indorsement of the anti-Tammany Democrats," he said as he hurried by. "I've just had a talk with Seeley and Ellison. They're coming here at three o'clock."

Luke held up his paper.

"This is an awful thing," he said.

"What?" asked Leighton. He passed beside Luke's desk. "Oh, the North Bridge wreck? Yes, isn't it? When Ellison and Seeley come, don't let anybody butt in on me."

"You know who are really the responsible crowd in the M. & N.?" Luke persisted. His manner was the sleepy manner that had grown upon him for the past twelvemonth, but his eyes were keen.

"Yes," said Leighton absently. He ran his fingers through his always disordered hair. "Yes I know, but we couldn't prove it." He looked at his watch. "Don't forget," he concluded, "you're to head off anybody that comes after three o'clock, and if you're busy, then turn them over to one of the other fellows."

§2. At half-past four Luke's office-boy announced James T. Rollins.

Luke looked up heavily from the latest edition of the Evening World.

"Who's James T. Rollins?" he inquired.

The boy did not know. "But he looks like he owned the Stock Exchange," he said. "Wanted the Boss: I told him he was busy."

Luke wearily laid aside his paper.

"Very well, bring him in."

The boy went out and straightway reopened the door to admit the visitor.

Dressed in a russet brown, Rollins was short and stout; his eyebrows were bushy, and he made an effort to keep his thick lips drawn in a firm line. He so much resembled the pictures of the man just then predominant in Luke's mind that the assistant District-Attorney was startled.

"Mr. Rollins?"

The visitor tried to speak, but seemed to be unable to accomplish articulation. He nodded. He stood erect in the attitude of one accustomed to receive orders, and his right hand tapped his stiff hat against his thigh.

Luke indicated a chair beside his desk.

"Sit down."

Rollins complied. He sat far forward in the chair, as if expecting to be ordered out of it at the next moment. Both hands now clutched the brim of his hat, which he held between his fat, outspread knees.

"You wanted to see Mr. Leighton?" inquired Luke.

Rollins coughed.

"Yes, sir."

"I'm sorry." Luke was accustomed to callers of the hesitant sort: he wished that this one would go and leave him alone with the new idea that was growing in his brain; but Leighton, like the good politician that he was, had always given strict orders that every caller should be well received. "I'm afraid Mr. Leighton's very busy now. He has some most important business in hand."

Rollins made an effort toward dignity; his words succeeded, but his manner of uttering them failed:

"My business is important, too."

"And immediate?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then perhaps I can attend to it for you."

Rollins shook his head.

"I've got to see the District-Attorney."

"But I am his assistant."

"Yes, sir, I know. But this is confidential."

Luke began to lose patience.

"Well," he said, "as I told you, I'm sorry, but you can't see him."

In spite of Leighton's orders and his own customary obedience to them, Luke's voice had become sharp. It was just then only the sharpness of an underling; but, because Rollins himself was an underling, the visitor resented it, and this resentment gave him the courage he wanted. He stood up, and he bore himself with an erectness which had a fresh character.

"It's him that will be sorry," he said. "I came here to give him information that'd re-elect him."

Notwithstanding the man's new attitude, Luke thought he scented the crank. All sorts of cranks infested the District-Attorney's office, and every sort was certain it could purge the city or re-elect Leighton. Luke lost his temper. He spoke with the drawl with which he commonly spoke, but his tone was bitter. His tongue laid hold of the uppermost thought in his head.

"I suppose," he said, "you've come here to place the blame for the North Bridge wreck?"

The breath caught in Rollins's throat.

"How did you know?" he demanded.

It was not a crank that asked that question: it was a sane man badly startled. Luke recognized the distinction and instantly resolved to push the advantage he had fortuitously gained. He rose, smiling slowly.

"You've told me you knew I was one of the assistant district-attorneys of New York," he drawled. "I would advise you to act on the knowledge, Mr. Rollins, and not to lose any time about it."

"I——" began Rollins; but bluster came to the aid of his timidity. "No," he said, "I've got to see Mr. Leighton."

Luke had no idea who his visitor was or what information he might possess, but he was now certain that worth-while information was in Rollins's possession. Without further fencing, the lawyer, therefore, resorted to an old stratagem that he had learned when he first entered the District-Attorney's office: on the bare chance that the evidence might be documentary and within reach, he took a quick stride towards Rollins, raising his right hand as if to seize him. At once the right hand of Rollins shot upward and stopped protectingly over his breast.

"Now then," said Luke, "hand me those papers that you've got in your breast-pocket."

"No," said Rollins; "no; they're for Mr. Leighton."

"Hand them over.'"

"They're mine."

"If you don't hand them over," said Luke lazily, "I shall take them."

"You've got no right to!"

"You'd better save yourself trouble, Mr. Rollins."

"I won't!"

From under his lazy lids, Luke saw that the man was only frightened. With a flash of inspiration, the lawyer guessed something of the truth. This fellow was probably a clerk in the M. & N. offices.

"You won't be arrested for robbing the office-files, if that's what you're scared about," he said; "and you won't be told on and discharged."

Rollins was visibly relieved.

"You give me your word, Mr. Huber?"

"I do. Come on now: let's see what you've got."

"And—I'm not a rich man, Mr. Huber."

Luke's face showed his disgust.

"I shan't pay you a cent," he said; "but I daresay Leighton won't mind paying. Only even he won't buy a pig in a poke. Give me those papers. If they're worth anything, I'll take you into the District-Attorney's room right away—or, if there's somebody in there, I'll have him out here."

Rollins realized that Luke meant what he said. He believed, moreover, that his inquisitor was merely cautious.

"All right," he agreed, though with some reluctance. "This is a letter from my employer to a man that always had to return such letters after he's read them. The other letter is the letter from the rail manufacturers that's referred to in the first one. I got them both by——"

"I can guess how," said Luke.

He put out his hand and into it Rollins placed two sheets of paper, that were headed on top simply by an embossed Wall Street address and dated almost five years before.

Luke read:

"Confidential.

"MR. ROBERT M. DOHAN, "Delaware Avenue, "Buffalo, N. Y.

"DEAR MR. DOHAN:

"I understand that the bill of which you have spoken to me will be passed and become a law to-day. I have just seen Messrs. Hallett and Rivington and have secured their agreement to the plan outlined in my personal conversation with you last week. In view of the favors that you have done me in the past, I think it fair to tell you, for your own use only, that my friends have decided that they and I ought to do what you thought they might decide, viz.: unload at the end of five years. Considering your contemplated resignation next year, this will not affect you, except favorably in case you care to manipulate your own holdings in accordance with this news.

"I note what you say about the estimate submitted by the construction-department; also the letter of the steel-rail manufacturers which you inclosed, in which they say that the grade I suggested might not wear well. I think their use of the word 'dangerous' is absurdly exaggerated. We have used this grade on several of our roads and feel sure from long experience that, with proper repair-gangs, it will wear for five years as well as the best.

"My desire and the desire of my associates is to protect the interests of the stockholders. With that in mind, I should state, what you have probably already gathered, that we feel that the new line must be built and operated with all possible economy."

The signature was the signature that Luke expected.

"Those rails," said Rollins, "weren't replaced. Dohan resigned, and these letters have been in our office ever since. The crowd was planning to unload in November."

"Yes," said Luke dryly. His face was immobile and his voice calm, but his heart seemed to beat against his ribs, demanding freedom. "Come on in here to Mr. Leighton's office."

§3. He had forgotten Seeley and Ellison, but they were already gone, and Leighton was alone. Apparently the conference had been satisfactory, for the District-Attorney's face was a little less careworn.

"Mr. Leighton," said Luke, closing the door, "this man"—he indicated Rollins by a lazy movement of his hand—"is a secretary in the employ of the person to whom these letters belong—or belonged." He held out the letters that Rollins had given him.

Leighton's face clouded.

"Office business? I thought I told you I had some personal matters to think over."

Luke choked an impulse of resentment.

"If you'll look at these letters," he said, "I believe you'll find they apply to—both sorts of duties."

Leighton took the papers with a gesture of annoyance, but when he saw the signature to the more important of them, his eyes shone, and he looked up quickly.

"Where did you get these?" He flung the question at Rollins.

The informer had been standing behind Luke, as if seeking his shelter. His breath came heavily.

"I found them in the office-files," he mumbled.

"He stole them," said Luke quietly.

"Oh, Mr. Huber, if you're going to talk like that——"

"He stole them," Luke pursued—"or so he says. The only question in my mind is: are they genuine?"

Rollins showed signs of resenting this suggestion more keenly than the declaration that he was a thief. Leighton, however, interrupted: he was squinting at the letter that Luke had read in full.

"No," he said, "this is real enough. I know the signature."

"You know it?" Luke was surprised.

"Yes, yes." Leighton read the letter through; then turned upon Rollins with a resumption of his cross-examining manner. "How much d'you want for these?"

Rollins beat his hat upon his thigh.

"Well," he said, "they ought to be worth a good deal to you, Mr. Leighton."

"I'll give you five hundred dollars."

"Mr. Leighton!" Rollins was deprecating. "Five hundred dollars!"

"What do you want, then? Speak up."

"Five thousand would be nearer value, Mr. Leighton."

Luke turned away. This was the part of the business that he loathed.

"I'll give you two thousand and not a cent more," said Leighton.

Rollins thought himself now in a commanding position.

"I can't consider that," he said with the nearest approach to firmness he had yet shown.

"All right," said Leighton. "Huber!" He handed the letters to Luke. "Put these in your safe while I telephone this fellow's employer."

"Mr. Leighton!" Rollins bounded forward. His fat face worked with rage, disappointment, and fear. "You wouldn't do that. This is robbery. It's blackmail! For God's sake, Mr. Leighton——"

"Two thousand dollars," said Leighton.

"But think a minute, Mr. Leighton! I've been in my job for seven years—worked up to it from office-boy. I could any time have sold tips along the street for twice that money, and yet this is the first time I've ever—ever——"

"Ever double-crossed your boss. Well, why'd you do it?"

"I don't know. It was because this wreck is so awful."

"And what else?"

"Nothing else."

Leighton thrust a forefinger into the informer's face.

"What else?"

Rollins jumped back.

"Well, he—he didn't raise my pay. I've got a big family, and there's a mortgage on my little house in Roseville, and a man in my position has to live well, or people'd talk."

Leighton relaxed. He swung back in his chair and cocked his feet on the desk.

"I'll make it two thousand five hundred for your family's sake. That's my last word."

Luke, who had again turned his back on the hagglers, the letters safely buttoned in an inside pocket of his coat, wondered how his chief could afford such an outlay.

"Is that really the best you can do?" whined Rollins.

"It is the best I will do," said Leighton. Without lowering his feet, he pulled toward him the telephone, which was attached to his desk by an arm that could be lengthened or shortened at the user's will. "Now, then, your boss has gone home long ago; but I can get him at his house; do you want to lose your job or make this money?"

Rollins surrendered.

"I guess I'll have to take your price," he said. "But it's almost a charity I'm doing."

"Right!" Leighton released the telephone, quickly swung his legs from the desk and sat straight.

"And you'll promise nobody'll ever know where you got these letters?"

"Certainly."

Rollins looked toward Luke's significant back.

"And Mr. Huber, too?"

Luke turned.

"I've already promised you that," he said.

Leighton smiled faintly as he said to Luke:

"I guess you don't happen to have two thousand five hundred in loose change about you, do you, Huber?"

"No," said Luke. He saw nothing humorous anywhere in the situation.

"Well, this is no affair for checks, and my bank's uptown," Leighton continued. "I don't suppose," he said to Rollins, "you would care to give credit, my dear sir?"

Rollins could smile, if Luke could not. He shook his head.

"My bank," said Luke, anxious to end the scene, "is just around the corner. It's closed, but the clerks will still be there. They know me. I can get them to let me in the side door, and I know they'll do me a favor. I've got just about that much on deposit." He looked at Leighton. "Shall I take Rollins along?"

"Rollins? Yes." Leighton's good-humor seemed to have returned to stay. "Then hurry back here—alone. I'll want to talk this thing over with you."

§4. Luke paid and dismissed Rollins. Returning, he found Leighton walking rapidly up and down his office.

"Shut the door," said the District-Attorney. His face was flushed; he spoke quickly.

Luke shut the door.

Leighton came forward and brought his hand down on Luke's shoulder with a resounding smack.

"Do you know what this means?" he cried. His mouth was wide with laughter; the whole man exulted. "This re-elects me! Nothing can keep us out now, Huber—not a thing on God's green footstool. All we've got to do is use these letters and then sit back and fold our arms and attend to office business. Politics? These two pieces of paper will play all the politics we need, and more besides. I could shout, Huber; I could sing a regular Song of Deborah. What about Mr. Timothy Heney, now? And his Tammany? Gone the way of Sisera, my boy. Tim Heney! 'At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead!'"

Luke's old enthusiasm was rekindled. He thought that he had been misjudging Leighton. Of course the man had been discouraged: he had never before been able to seize an efficient weapon with which to shatter the forces of wrong; even at this time it was only reasonable that his first thought should be of his immediate political opponents; but the weapon was put into his hand at last, the blow would be given against both Tammany and Wall Street; it would be the blow that Luke had hoped for when he read the first accounts of the North Bridge wreck.

"There must be a special Grand Jury to investigate the disaster," said Luke, his words falling over one another much as Leighton's had done. "We must keep the letters dark till it's in session, and then produce them. We can give them to the papers right afterward. It will be jail for the lot of them. Big as they are, it'll be that. It'll be the end of the whole crowd!"

Leighton drew away. His face changed. His entire attitude altered.

"What are you talking about?" he asked dryly.

"Why"—Luke was amazed—"about these letters, of course."

"Well, do you think I'm green enough to waste them on a jury? Not much!"

Luke began to comprehend. He felt unsteady. He was standing close to Leighton's desk, and he put out a hand and gripped the edge of its top shelf.

"Not give them to the jury?" But perhaps he was wrong. Of course he was wrong. "Oh, I see," he said; "maybe it's better not to risk any more lives by waiting. You're going to force this crowd to put down a decent road-bed? Only if you do that—— Well, it's fine of you, but you'll not be any better off politically."

Leighton turned his swivel-chair and sat down in it. His manner became that of an employer trying to be calm and to instill reason into an annoying employee.

"Young man," said he, "just you listen to me for about two minutes. Those fellows do control this road, but they didn't operate it. In spite of Rollins's blessed letters, you can't absolutely say they operate it. But what they do operate, when they want to, are the politics of this city, and if they tell Tammany, yes, or me, to hold off and let an election go the way they want it, why, hold off Tammany or anybody else has to. Nobody could win if they said 'No.' Now, then"—Leighton punctuated his words with the rise and fall of an index finger—"they're not actually morally responsible for the conduct of the M. & N., but they'll know the publication of these letters would make the public think they were. They'll know the publication would wreck the road they're still interested in, smash all their other stocks and depreciate all their other interests, start a panic that might swamp even them, and maybe begin a public row that would send them close to jail, on general principles, legal evidence or no legal evidence. To stop that, they'd be willing to have me elected, which they weren't yet quite certain about being to-day. I'll go to them quietly, and then I'll surrender these letters, when they've kept their part of the bargain I'll make. And don't you worry about loss of life. That engineer was probably green or drunk, or the signal man got rattled. You'll see the coroner's jury says so. But, anyhow, once I'm safely re-elected, I'll take care the M. & N. is better regulated than it has been. There's no use in a row: a little moral suasion will do the trick."

He tossed back, and clasped his hands behind his head.

The explanation had been too long: it was long enough to allow Luke to master the shock of what it implied. He saw his last illusions concerning Leighton fall under the impact of Leighton's own words. He was aghast. He was ashamed of his master; he was ashamed of himself for ever having served such a master. But he was not crushed. As his chief proceeded, Luke's soul rose through indignation to red revolt. By the time that Leighton ceased speaking, Luke, except for two spots of crimson on his cheeks, was captain of his rage. He leaned against the desk-side indolently, his eyelids lowered, and when he replied it was with an indifferent drawl.

"It doesn't much matter whether the engineer was drunk or the signal man rattled," he said: "the rail flattened, and the bridge fell. The rail was drunk and the bridge was rattled."

Leighton shook himself peevishly.

"You're trying to be humorous," he said.

"No; oh, no," said Luke gently. "What I'm getting at is, it seems to me the men who directly controlled this road were directly responsible for its operation. I mean that the men who authorized that letter, and insisted on the policy it lays down, are guilty. It strikes me they ought to be either reformed or punished."

"Oh, hell!" said Leighton. Heretofore, Luke had always appeared to be on his side, so that the District-Attorney did not know the meaning of his assistant's outward calm. "Those letters aren't legal evidence enough."

"I think they are, Leighton. Besides, I think there are times when moral evidence goes ahead of legal evidence, and ought to—and I think this is one of those times."

"Well," said Leighton, "I don't. So that ends it."

"Of course," Luke calmly pursued, "if you could make these fellows re-lay the road, it might be worth while to do no more than scare them, at least if you don't consider the political ethics and consider only the immediate protection of life."

"I told you I'd take care of the regulation of the road as soon as I was re-elected."

"Ye-es. But could you?"

"Certainly I could."

"I should say that once they'd got their letters back, you'd be in their power."

Leighton got to his feet. He was angry. He faced Luke, who did not shift his lazy pose.

"Look here," he said, "we've been friends, and you've done good work for me, especially this afternoon——"

"Thanks," said Luke.

"But it looks as if the time had come when you'd better understand who's the head of this office."

"You are," Luke assured his chief; and then added: "I'm glad to say."

"Well, then, Huber, I've got to tell you that if you don't act accordingly, we must part company."

Luke raised his listless eyes.

"You've quite made up your mind to do this thing, Leighton?"

"Let you go? Not if you'll only be reasonable."

"I mean this thing about the letters."

"Yes."

"You're going to make use of these fellows' money-power in politics?"

"It's already in politics. It always has been."

"But you are going to try to use it for yourself?"

"Yes, I am. It's my own business."

"Is it? That money is blood-money, Leighton."

"You're a fool!"

"I know I am. But it's you that I'm worried about. You're quite determined?"

"Absolutely."

Luke shrugged his shoulders. He began to move slowly toward the door.

"Here!" said Leighton sharply. "Where're you going?"

Luke scarcely looked at him.

"I'm going to write my resignation."

Leighton was startled, but he tried not to show it.

"Very well," he said, "write it. But don't be too fast: you may hand over those letters first."

"Letters?" Luke seemed never to have heard the word before. "What letters?"

"Why do you try so hard to be an ass, Huber?" The District-Attorney extended his hand for the papers that he had given Luke during the interview with Rollins. "Drop all this resignation rot—My letters, of course."

Luke's face met Leighton's fairly.

"The only letters I have about me," he said with quiet distinctness, "are two that are my property. I bought them with the last two thousand five hundred dollars of my own money."

As the words came home to him, Leighton's face grew purple. His brows met in a knot. At his temples two veins pulsed visibly.

"What's that?" he cried with a straining throat. "What's that? You—— Give them here this minute; they're mine! They're mine. They're mine! You know damned well they're mine!"

He had not counted on this. The unexpected disappointment tossed him from the summit of the hopes to which, that afternoon, he had been so unexpectedly lifted. He made a blind dash at Huber.

Luke's two hands caught both of Leighton's wrists. By the exertion of a superior strength that scarcely showed itself, the assistant forced down the master's arms and held them at his flanks.

"They are my letters," said Luke.

"Let go!" Leighton wrenched at the imprisoning grip; but he wrenched without effect. "Let me go!"

"Certainly," said Luke. He freed the panting man. "I merely wanted to protect myself and show you it wouldn't help you to use force."

Leighton, his face still contorted, tried another tone.

"It isn't fair of you, Huber. I'm sorry I went at you that way; but you know well enough those letters belong to me."

"They belong," said Luke, "to the man that can make the better use of them."

"What use can you make?"

"A better one than you say you will."

"They were brought here for me."

"By a thief."

"Well, you're not going to restore them to their owner, are you?"

"Perhaps."

"What?" Leighton laughed cynically. "So that's what your moral tone's for, is it?"

"Perhaps."

"Oh, come on, Huber, I didn't mean that. Anyhow, you know, I only asked you to lend me the money."

"The letters," said Luke again, "belong to the man that can make the better use of them."

"I'll do the right thing by you, Huber, if you give them back to me."

"Thank you. The real owner of the letters can do more—when I'm for sale."

Leighton bent forward and began to whisper.

"I'll tell you what I'll do for you politically," he began. "I'll——"

"No thank you," said Luke.

"Well, then,"—Leighton, his face now white from fear of loss, appeared to capitulate-"give them back and I'll use them the way you want them used."

The two men's eyes probed one another.

"I don't believe you," said Luke.

It was final, and it drove Leighton back to his purple rage.

"I'll ruin you!" he threatened. "And they'll ruin you. Go ahead and resign. Resign? You can't. You're fired! Do you hear that? You're fired! Now go and try to do something. You can't do a thing but sell those letters to the people they were stolen from. If you try that, I'll show you up, and if you try anything else with those people, they'll bury you so deep nobody ever can dig down far enough to find you. Do you know who you're up against when you buck that crowd? They won't let you walk the same earth with them! Go on. You'll be killed, and I'll be damned glad of it. Fight them, will you? You might as well draw a gun on God Almighty! Now, then, get out of here. Get out, or I'll have you kicked out!"

CHAPTER VI

To his office on the twentieth floor of a Wall Street skyscraper—that office with the mahogany table at its center and the engraving of George Washington between two windows—the master came at his usual time on the morning of the day following the North Bridge wreck. He was dressed neatly, as always, in a suit of russet brown. Breathing visibly, but noiselessly, he passed the resting ticker and walked to one of the windows overlooking the labyrinth. His near-sighted, beady eyes peered toward the web of streets below, on the cross-threads of which the black dots that were hurrying men and women bobbed like struggling flies.

The master rang for his secretary.

"Rollins," he said, "what's in the——" He stopped. He had not looked up, yet he asked: "What's the matter with you this morning?"

"Nothing," said Rollins. "I——" He coughed behind his hand. "I didn't sleep well last night."

"Take more exercise," said his master. "What's in the mail?"

"Thirty letters that need your personal attention, sir."

Nimbly the master ran them through his short and stumpy fingers, the tips of which were delicately rounded. He dictated his terse instructions. With the daily routine again in motion, Rollins recaught his employer's calm.

"Simpson has the begging letters?"

"Yes, sir."

"I guess," said the master in his most commonplace tone, "there were more than the usual number of anonymous threats."

"Only ten or twelve more."

"Burn them."

"Yes, sir. I always do."

"And, Rollins, draw up a letter to the cancer hospital and tell the management I have decided to give them a special ward for fibroid tumor cases. Their lawyers may consult with Judge Stein; I gave him the details last evening. Bring me the letter for revision."

"Yes, sir."

The master proceeded through his customary schedule.

"Rollins," he said, when it was at last completed and the secretary had been recalled. "Mr. Hallett and Mr. Rivington will be here"—he consulted his watch—"in five minutes. We are on no account to be disturbed."

Hallett and Rivington came in, five minutes later. Hallett looked angry, and Rivington frightened. Though the hour was early, Hallett's white waistcoat, fresh every morning, showed wrinkles, and its wearer chewed hard at an unlighted cigar; there was a deep perpendicular line over his short, thick nose. Rivington, immaculate, pulled at his slightly gray mustache.

"Good-morning," said their host. His voice was as nearly cheerful as it was ever. "Sit down."

They took their places at the table, where there was a pad of scribbling paper and a freshly sharpened pencil before each. Their host sat at the head of the table, his hands flat upon the table-top, their fingers extended, his elbows pointing ceilingward.

Rivington began at the midst of what worried him.

"It's a terrible thing!" he groaned. "Think of it; twenty-five people—and the women too!"

Hallett's comment was almost a bark.

"As soon as the coroner's jury lets 'em down easy," he said, "we've got to see that everybody's fired, from the division-superintendent to the president of the road; that's what we've got to do. There's one kind of carelessness that's not much better than murder."

"Twenty-five people!" repeated Rivington. The numbers seemed to hypnotize him; he made a futile gesture. "And the morning papers—— Their tone—— I don't like it."

The man at the head of the table watched them both, but said nothing.

"Oh, the newspapers never worry me," said Hallett. "We can stop all but one or two, and nobody cares what they say, anyhow. They've been talkin' for years. They've got to fill their columns."

"Then there's the Board meeting," said Rivington. "Next Thursday—— I don't see—— Really I don't."

"The Board of Directors of the M. & N.'s all right," Hallett reassured him.

"Perhaps. But then, too, there is this new reform element in town. Talk of a fusion movement: a fourth candidate for District-Attorney—— They will be only too eager to get hold of something, and this terrible accident—— It will give them just what they want."

"They can't elect."

"I am not so sure. The people—they aren't what they used to be. Something—I don't know what—has taken possession of them."

Hallett bobbed assent to that.

"Yes," he said, "nowadays as soon as a man gets a vote he stops minding his own business. But we've still got our grip on the wires."

"They may break." Rivington's fingers returned to their tugging at his mustache. "The wires, I mean. It's ugly. Twenty-five dead and a hundred hurt——"

"We didn't hurt 'em."

Rivington looked toward the man at the head of the table, but he sat crouched and silent.

"No," said Rivington; "but——" His sentence ended in a helpless waving of the hand.

"Then what are you worryin' about?" Hallett challenged. "We were only tryin' to keep up dividends. We had to choose between a little risk and protecting the stockholders. Lots of the stockholders are widows and orphans. Besides, it wasn't a real risk; it was a recognized, legitimate business risk. Lots of other roads do it right along. Our own roads do."

"That bridge——" said Rivington.

"The state inspectors passed it a month ago. And they passed the rails, too. It's all up to them."

In his turn, Hallett glanced at the man at the head of the table. He saw the man's hairy hands, fat and white against the mahogany, begin to move as they always began to move before he made a verbal attack upon conversation; but the man did not speak.

"I know," Rivington was saying, "but with the four candidates for the district-attorneyship all looking for vote-getting material——"

"Buy 'em," said Hallett.

"Four?"

"Who's the fourth?"

"They haven't chosen him yet; but——"

"Buy 'em," repeated Hallett.

"Out of the four there might be one we couldn't——"

"Anybody can buy anybody. There are more ways than one. Anyhow, we're not even directors."

"We own the road. Practically——"

"Nobody knows that."

"It seems to me——"

"They don't!" Hallett spat to the floor a bit of tobacco that, bitten from the end of his cigar, had clung to his lips. "They only think they do. It'd be the hardest thing in the world to prove that was ever tried."

"Would it?" Rivington questioned. "I really believe——"

The quick, cold voice of the third man flashed across their talk. It was as if he leaped at them.

"We may own the road," he said; "but we don't operate it. Not one of us has officially any administrative power in the matter of its operation. You gentlemen have forgotten that." He smiled: his teeth were pointed.

"Still," said Rivington, "if the fusion movement——"

He stopped there, not because of his habit of speaking in tangents, but because the door opened, and an old man timidly paused at its threshold.

The master of the office turned his head slowly.

"Simpson?" he said.

"Yes, sir," said the man at the door.

"What does this mean? Where's Rollins?"

"He was using my room to compose that letter about the hospital, and so I took his place."

"Didn't he tell you we were not to be disturbed?"

"Yes, sir; but this man"—Simpson held out an envelope—"got by everybody. He told me you would see him at once if you only received his message."

The man at the head of the table reached for the envelope. He read a card that it had contained.

"Show him in," he said.

He waited until Simpson had left to obey. Then, without wasting a glance on his associates, he explained:

"This is the card of a man called Luke Huber, Assistant District-Attorney. He's written on it: 'Five minutes in regard to the North Bridge wreck and your letters about it.'"

"Letters?" said Hallett. "What letters?"

As he replied, the strong jaw of the man at the head of the table worked as if he were chewing.

"That's what I mean to find out."

"Here? Now?" Rivington gasped.

The man addressed nodded. When a nod could save words, he saved words.

"Is that the careful thing?" asked Hallett.

"I'll bet his card's a bluff and he never expected to get in at all."

"That is precisely why I am having him in."

"Mr. Huber," announced Simpson.

Huber was still a young man. He was so young, and his youth was so ostentatious, that he immediately courted the rebuke once administered to Pitt. Moreover, he seemed to lack energy. He was thin; his face, though pleasant, was white. The lids dropped wearily over eyes that were at first veiled from the three men who looked up, but did not rise at his entrance. His mouth, the lips of which were only a pale pink, might have appeared firm, but would certainly have given the impression of being tired of firmness, and, when he bowed gravely to his host, his bristling head inclined itself so slowly and so slightly that the effort of the inclination, whether mental or physical, was insultingly apparent.

There was no form of presentation. Instead, there was a pause that only Huber seemed not to notice. Rivington drummed on the table with his long fingers. Hallett chewed his cigar. The other man smiled so enigmatically that it was impossible to say whether he intended to welcome or was amused by his friends' discomfiture.

"Bring a chair for Mr. Huber."

Simpson did as he was bid.

Luke deposited a carefully brushed hat on the table. Then he sank into the proffered chair opposite the leader of the trio and extended his long legs under the mahogany. His feet touched Rivington's, and Rivington jumped.

"Well?" asked the man at the head of the table.

Huber did not raise his heavy lids.

"I am glad I found you three together," he said slowly in a low and extremely gentle voice, "because you are the three men that control the railroad."

Hallett grinned a broad grin. This young fellow talked as if there were but one railroad in which the group was interested.

"What railroad?" he asked.

Luke slowly drew in his legs. He regarded the figure of the Persian rug that happened to be between the points of his patent-leather boots.

"The railroad," said he, "that I suppose you have been talking most about this morning."

"The Manhattan & Niagara?" blurted Rivington.

"We're not directors of that road," said Hallett hurriedly.

"No," agreed Rivington.

"No," said Luke, quite as heartily, "you aren't directors, but you direct it."

"We don't," snapped Rivington.

The man at the head of the table raised a soothing hand. He was still smiling.

"Come, come," he said, with an air of good-nature that his friends had seldom seen him assume during business hours. "We're all gentlemen, I'm sure. Anything that Mr. Huber wants to say to us in confidence——"

Huber interrupted.

"I never talk in confidence," said he; "and I don't want anybody to say anything to me that he would be ashamed to say in public."

His eyes were still hidden, and he still spoke slowly and gently; but the mere import of his words brought up short even the leader of the trio before him. That one's manner changed. He was curt.

"We are busy men, Mr. Huber," he said. "There are not many people in New York that we would have allowed to take up our time this morning. What do you want?"

Luke studied the figure on the rug.

"I want you three," he said in a tone not to be quickened, "to tear up every mile of rails on the M. & N. and replace those pieces of scrap-iron with rails of a grade fit to bear the traffic they have to carry."

Rivington's drumming fingers closed into his palms. Hallett let out an ugly laugh. Only the man at the head of the table, again changing his manner, equaled Luke in tranquillity.

"Really, Mr. Huber," he said pleasantly, "without admitting for a moment that we have the power to do what you suggest, don't you think your request is a rather large one?" He had the air of indulgently correcting a mistaken child.

The young man, gazing at the rug, shook his round head.

"No," he said, "not so large for you as its alternative."

"And that? It is——"

Rivington had put the question, but it was toward the man at the head of the table that Luke as he shot out his sudden reply, raised his eyes.

"Jail," said Luke.

"Do you mean to threaten us?" cried Rivington angrily.

Hallett laughed.

The man at the head of the table only smiled.

"Not at all," said Luke. "I am merely stating a fact. In coming here, the only thing I hesitated about was whether it would be better for the people to have safe transportation immediately guaranteed or to have you three in jail."

"You seem to forget, young man," said Hallett, "who it was elected the man that made you assistant district-attorney."

Luke gave him the briefest of glances.

"It was because I found out who elected him that I resigned the job," he answered. "I have just been offered the Municipal League's nomination for District-Attorney. When I am elected, it will be by the people."

"That will be about 2000 A.D.," sneered Hallett.

Luke shrugged his thin shoulders and returned his gaze toward the leader of the trio.

"A bridge falls on one of your roads in this county," he said. "It kills twenty-five people and wounds a hundred—all passengers in one of your trains. You will say the state inspectors declared the bridge O.K. Maybe they did, though they ought to go to the electric chair for it. That doesn't matter. What I can prove by thirty witnesses is that the train left the bridge before the bridge fell. A rail flattened and threw the train. Instead of sending you men to jail—and only because I think this is better for the safety of the public—I will give you one month to begin laying decent rails on this road—actually get bona fide work under way. If you don't do that, I'll make public the whole truth, get you indicted, go into court as a witness and produce two letters, one forwarded to you and the other signed by you. The first of these is a letter to the president of the road written by the steel manufacturers; it warns him that the cheap rails he's ordered are dangerous: that letter he sent to you. The second is a letter from you to the president of the road in which you say you want the poor-grade rails used because you don't want to increase the running expenses, and you order a general keeping-down of the road's expenses because of a plan for you three to unload your stock along about this December."

Luke rose. He relapsed into the weary young man of ten minutes before.

"You have one month," he said.

He picked up his hat, rubbed it with a caressing hand, and left the room.

The three that he left stared at one another. Then both Hallett and Rivington looked at their leader.

"It's an infamous—it must be an infamous lie!" cried Rivington. "Letters like that—men don't write them!"

Without moving a muscle of his face, the man at the head of the table looked at Rivington.

"All men say they don't," he corrected, "and all men do."

"What?" asked Hallett. "You're joking, and this fellow can't ever make it good. It's a bluff."

"Gentlemen," said the man at the head of the table, "it's the truth."

CHAPTER VII

§1. When Luke, on the afternoon preceding his Wall Street interview, had walked out of Leighton's office and the city's employ, it was with no certain plan for further action. His years of experience as an assistant prosecutor had demonstrated to him that something was drastically wrong with the modern administration of justice and practice of the law; his life in New York had shown him the evil influence of the money-power that seemed to be set in motion by the author of the Rollins letter and certainly corrupted the entire body of the nation, and his political work had discovered to him what he came to consider the inherent rottenness of the organized political parties. The effect of all this was made acute by the horror at the North Bridge wreck and the culmination of his mistrust in Leighton. Luke's sole immediate sensation was that of a man who finds himself in a bog: he did not think of draining the bog for the benefit of future pedestrians; he thought only of extricating himself from the mire.

That night at his club, however, he began to consider the larger aspects of the case. He was in the writing-room, intent on composing for the next evening's papers a statement of his reasons for parting company with Leighton. In formulating these, he found his charges to be precisely the charges recently formulated by the group of municipal reformers who were clamoring for a fusion of the best elements of all parties to elect, by honest methods, honest men that would purge New York of its civic shame. He recalled how this Municipal Reform League, growing steadily, had worried Leighton, and how its promoters prophesied that, if successful in the place of its origin, it might well spread throughout the country. When he first heard of it, Luke had been too deep in the affairs of his chief to be warmed by it; but to-night his vision was cleared.

He telephoned to two of the League's leaders. They came to his club and talked with him until long past midnight, themselves telephoning inquiries and instructions to friends and lieutenants, and summoning other leaders to join them.

Luke told them much. He betrayed no secrets of his recent employer, but he could honorably tell enough to make it clear to them that their belief in the necessity of reform was correct, enough to have weight with the voters should he speak to them in the new cause. His public record, it appeared, had long impressed the reformers; the firmness underlying his slow habit of talk, and the determination imperfectly covered by his lazy manner, impressed them now. He moved and fired them.

The Rollins letter he did not mention. He was more than once tempted, but he had resolved upon provisional silence before ever he sent for these leaders. He weighed carefully the merits of the courses open to him and decided that, large as would be the benefit of a public airing of his charges, and excellent as might prove the salutary example of a prison term for America's chief financiers, the airing might be lessened by those financiers' subtle influences upon popular opinion, the prison term might be escaped through similar influences, and all good results would in any case be long delayed. On the other hand, it was evident to him, in his present frame of mind, that the immediate safety of the M. & N.'s patrons was paramount, and that this safety could probably be secured by threatening those morally responsible for it. Such a threat, with a rigid time-limit, he therefore elected to administer.

The first result of his conference with the reformers was unexpected. At eight o'clock next morning, three of their most prominent men, who had not been with him on the night before, came to his apartments at the Arapahoe in Thirty-ninth Street. They had been in all-night consultation, and they told him that their organization had determined to put a full ticket in the field at the coming municipal election, but to center efforts in a struggle for the district-attorneyship: they had chosen him for their candidate.

Luke, in dressing-gown and pajamas, his unbrushed hair more than ever erect, looked from one of his callers to the other. There was Venable, a man of small but independent means, who had grown gray in the long war for civic betterment, meeting defeat at the polls and, what is harder to bear, disappointment in elected candidates, and again and again emerging to hope and fight on; Nelson, a successful wholesale druggist, whose business seemed divorced from politics, and whose hobby was the improvement of political conditions; and Yeates, a young man of family and fortune who belonged to Luke's club. Luke was flattered and confident, but did not show it.

"Do you really think I can do it?" he asked slowly. "Do you think I am the best man for the job?"

Each of the committee assured him he was. They said he had given a good account of himself as assistant district-attorney, won influential friends in his daily life, and secured, through his political speech-making for Leighton, a strong following among the voters.

"Of course," persisted Luke, "it's unnecessary to ask men of your standing that there shan't be anything but clean politics in our campaign."

Venable tossed his head proudly.

"My record is a guarantee of that," he said.

"No undue influence?" asked Luke. "No outside interests coming in to boss us or affect us in any way?"

"Rot!" said Yeates.

"And I am to have an absolutely free hand?"

They assured him of that.

Luke's lowered lids hid his eyes, but his eyes gleamed. Here, at last, was his Great Chance. Here was what he had lived and hoped for. He wanted to shout his war-cry, to go out and fight at once. Would he be worthy? The wing of that doubt brushed the farthest edges of his conscience, but he was young, and he did not heed it. He thought of all that he could do with this opportunity; and he thought, too, of Betty Forbes.

He had not seen much of Betty for some weeks. The lethargy that the slow process of his recent disillusionment flung over him, had left him despairing of her, kept her beyond his reach. But now he saw the way—saw that the way to win his ideals of honorable victory was also the way to win her.

He asked again a hundred questions, some that he had asked of his other counselors the night before and more that he had not: questions about purpose, ways-and-means, finances, organization, headquarters, district leaders, probable support, the temper of the public mind. To all of them he received sanguine answers.

"And your other candidates?" asked Luke. "The Mayor? Comptroller? President of the Board of Aldermen and the Borough Presidents?"

They gave him the names of known and honest men.

Luke stood up, but his air was the languid air that had become part of him.

"Good," he said, "of course, I'm pleased that you think of me as you do, and I accept."

§2. He would be a busy man now, but he must have that morning and afternoon to himself. However much he might want to start his campaign, he must make that visit to Wall Street, and after luncheon he intended to go to Betty.

The Wall Street interview seemed to him as successful as he could have expected. He was unterrified by the strength of the fortress to be attacked, but he had not looked forward to speedy surrender, so he was satisfied with the conviction that he affected the three financiers more than they cared to show. If they did not obey him, he would make the Rollins letters a part of his appeal to the electors; but he felt that, in the end, he would be offered obedience.

He lunched leisurely in the café attached to his apartment house, and then went to his own room to change his clothes before seeking Betty. He had completed the change and was about to leave when the telephone rang and the voice of the clerk below stairs announced a visitor:

"Judge Marcus F. Stein."

It had begun already. Luke knew who Stein was, though the two had never met. The man's title had been earned by a political appointment to fill the unexpired term of a judge that died while on the bench. Stein had begun his career as a young lawyer who specialized in damage suits against the N. Y. & N. J. railway. He was once charged, before the Bar Association—though the charges were never proved—with being a "hospital runner": that is, with employing men to hurry to the hospital, or the scenes of accidents, and induce victims to retain Stein to press their claims for damages against the railroad on which they had been injured. By devoting his best efforts against the N. Y. & N. J., he tried to make the corporation realize that it would be cheaper to employ him than to fight him, and he was, indeed, at last given a place on the legal staff of the company's claim department. There was an ugly story to the effect that, for a brief time before this charge was openly announced, he received a salary from the road while apparently acting for claimants against it and inducing them to compromise their claims for trivial sums.